1. Technical Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a corrugated cardboard box counting and discharging device which is provided in a corrugated cardboard box making machine wherein manufactured and folded corrugated cardboard boxes successively forwarded are temporarily stored until the number of the corrugated cardboard boxes reach a predetermined number, and then a group of the stored corrugated cardboard boxes are counted and discharged for a next manufacturing process.
2. Description of Related Art
In a conventional device, it has been arranged to discharge a group of folded corrugated cardboard boxes for a next manufacturing process when the number of the boxes have reached a predetermined number since it was considered preferable to bundle a predetermined number of folded corrugated cardboard boxes for facilitating the handling of said boxes wherein the folded corrugated cardboard boxes successively transported one by one in a horizontal direction from a delivery section in a corrugated cardboard box making machine are vertically stacked upward from the bottom and stored temporarily until the number of the corrugated cardboard boxes reach a predetermined number.
However, when the corrugated cardboard boxes divided into a group of a predetermined number is transported for a next manufacturing process, a corrugated cardboard box which is positioned uppermost of a next group tends to come in close contact with the bottom of a corrugated cardboard box positioned lowermost of the preceding group due to extremely short time interval between the time when a first box of the next group is forwarded and the time when a group of the stored boxes are sent out. The self-weight possessed by the stacked boxes also causes such an inconvenience whereby more than a predetermined number of corrugated cardboard boxes are transported with the preceding group, and corrugated cardboard boxes of each group are not discharged accurately in number.
With a view to solve the problem described above, the applicant of the present invention has proposed a device in U.S. Pat. No. 4,957,409 issued on Sep. 18, 1990 wherein folded corrugated cardboard boxes which have been forwarded are vertically stacked upward from the bottom keeping a very small gap between each one of the lower and upper boxes, and then a corrugated cardboard box positioned uppermost among the stacked boxes is moved in a horizontal direction one by one, and the number of the moved boxes are counted by a sensor. Thereafter, when the number of the boxes counted have reached a predetermined number, a bunch of the stacked corrugated cardboard boxes divided into a group of a predetermined number is moved in a horizontal direction all together.
However, there still remains a problem that each group of the corrugated cardboard boxes can not be discharged accurately in a predetermined number due to various manufacturing conditions such as a kind of sheet of a corrugated cardboard box and manufacturing speed.